CIA formally admits role in 1953 Iranian coup

Aug. 20, 2013
|

The Shah of Iran in a 1995 photo. / AP

by Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY

by Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY

The CIA, in recently declassified documents, has formally acknowledged that the spy agency helped to plan and execute the coup in Iran in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister who was in the process of nationalizing the country's British-controlled oil industry.

The acknowledgment is contained in documents obtained by the National Security Archive through a Freedom of Information Act. The archive, which is based at George Washington University's Gelman Library in Washington, posted the documents on its website along with related material.

The explicit reference to the CIA's role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s, the archive notes.

The CIA had released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release, the archive says.

Archive Deputy Director Malcolm Byrne, deputy director of the Archive, says he got the CIA's revised version in 2011 but has has held it in hopes even more information might be divulged. In the end, he chose to release the material now to mark the 60th anniversary of the coup on Aug. 19,1953.

The archieve, on its website, says posting the material surrounding the Iranian coup "is more than academic."

"Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur," the archive says.

The coup plot, which relied heavily on local collaborators, used propaganda to undermine Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq politically, arm-twisted the shah to get his cooperation, bribed members of parliament, organized the security forces that carried it out and stirred up public demonstrators to serve as a backdrop for the operation.

The initial coup attempt failed and the shah fled the country, but the organizers succeeded in a second attempt two days later.

Materials posted on the website include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup and the son of former President Theodore Roosevelt.

The CIA history of the operation called the coup a "last resort" to avoid the possibility that Iranian oil could fall under the control of the Soviet Union.

"The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government," the CIA history says.

It says Mosaddeq was "neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility" but a political leader "who had become so committed to the ideal of nationalism that he did things that could not have conceivably helped his people even in the best and most altruistic of worlds."

"In refusing to bargain, except on his own uncompromising terms, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he was in fact defying the professional politicians of the British government. These leaders believed, with good reason, that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital their their national interests."

Byrne, who edited an online book on the documents, called for the U.S. intelligence community to make fully available the remaining records on the coup period. "The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran," he says. "Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides."

Byrne, who also writes about the issue in Foreign Policy, notes that the reverberations from the coup have haunted the organizers over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism during the shah's ouster in early 1979 that culminated in the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

He says it is unclear why the CIA has finally chosen to own up formally to its role, which has been written about by CIA and British operatives over the years, and has even been acknowledged by two American presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

It could be a sign, he tells USA TODAY, "that there is a small crack in the culture of the agency where the primary mission is to hold onto secrets, not divulge them."

Regardless, such acknowledgements allow the American public a clearer understanding of its own history, Byrne says.

If it marks a sign of more openness, Byrne says,"that bodes well for our ability to get a less distorted version of history about other events in the future."